Blog 26 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

http://midsummernewyearofjohns.blogspot.com/2012/06/blog-1

Lilacs, Leaves, and Sky.

The most difficult of issue in our times is to imagine a return of self-sacrifice as a social practice.

How is this to be accomplished after two hundred years of confidently irresponsible action by those who (following the Arab scientists, the medieval alchemists, Bacon, Paracelsus, Descartes, Leibniz) believed that “…man had reached the point at which he could be confident of his progressive ability to control nature”? (--Clarence Glacken, Preface to “Traces….”) Are we not at the point at which most everyone recognizes the disaster brought by overconfidence, as Peter Bruegel the Elder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brueghel_the_Elder did when painting (16th c.) the Fall of Icarus? http://avatar-life.org/iki-large.jpg  

A realistic interpretation of Icarus’ fate is the sight of his leg (port and stern of the sailing ship) sticking out of the water. It is evidence beyond doubt that he is drowning and can no longer be rescued.

Icarus father http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus , Daedalus (were he able to predict the consequences of his son’s overconfidence), would have had no other choice than to warn his son by not offering advice not to fly too close to the sun, but by self-sacrificing himself. Only by giving his life as evidence of the seriousness of his word as to the consequences, could Daedalus perhaps have avoided his son growing up overconfident and careless.

The situation of humankind vis a viss the planet Earth runs a close, yet even worse parallel to the fate of Icarus. If Icarus were to fall today, Bruegel would have him fall into the plastic vortex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean http://blog.greeneventshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/image001.jpg .

In spite of the dire circumstances of our planet, is self-sacrifice an extreme counteraction? At other times and other places, I have called self-sacrifice a ‘not-violent’ act (see Esos’s Chronicles). Unfortunately, Judaism and Western Christianity has for a thousand years been preaching otherwise. Christianity’s first example of ‘suicide’ is by way of projecting it as the deserved fate of a traitor, Judas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Autun_cath%C3%A9drale_chapiteau_pendaison_de_Judas.jpg , the other example is the refusal of Western religions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_suicide to offer suicides a burial place in the churchyard.

The harsh opinion cast by many religions on ‘suicide’, has prevented our ‘civilization’ from contemplating the role of self-sacrifice as a serious tool by humankind in assuring a stable, egalitarian, and nature respecting society.

In spite of the censure, there are many examples when society has welcomed self-sacrificial acts by individuals as occasions for a given society’s awakening and rebirth. This generally occurs when some student, protesting oppression, commits “suicide”, as for example, the death of Romas Kalanta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romas_Kalanta  in Lithuania under Soviet rule. However, when Ādolfs Buķis did the same (1993) in post-Soviet Latvia to protest Latvian government corruption and allegedly named a several persons who believed to be guilty, he was called mentally unstable, and the promised police investigation never occurred.

Needless to say, ‘suicide’ is today closely linked to ‘terrorists’, because in the presence of a repressive attitude, it is impossible to engage in discussing the subject, whether in theological circles, let alone in the public media. Suicide is also used by governments in ‘false flag’ operations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_affair , because it enables these to further repress self-sacrifice by calling it a terrorist operation.

There is no doubt, that as long as ‘suicide’—be it out of the individual’s desire to self-sacrifice him- or herself or because of hate against whoever the individual may believe to be his or society’s enemy—the taking of innocent lives is an act contra the interests of self sacrifice. Indeed, if there were not evidence from the long ago that self-sacrifice also acts as a community creating and maintaining event, the evidence for it today would be wholly negative.

Thus, for self-sacrifice to return as a socially accepted practice, it will require the event to occur not as an event with political ends, but as an event arising out of the unconscious.

This, indeed, has begun to happen, if we take into consideration military and civilian ‘suicides’ (see blog 25), which cannot exclude the possibility of being the result of an over-virtualized man-made society or, for that matter, the intervention of the Will of God to release humankind from a man-made prison.

Blog 24 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The Eye of a Sawn Off Limb.

Will the “miracles” of the secular age never cease? Yesterday (June 24, 2012), browsing the Internet, I came across the following item:

“Washington—Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Friday promised a new focus on suicide prevention by military leaders, not just to benefit troops and veterans, but also the country as a whole.

The article appeared in the Stars and Stripes. Quoth the Stars and Stripes on behalf of the Defense Secretary:

“’My long term goal is for the Department of Defense to be a game-changing innovator in this field,’” he said during remarks at an annual interagency suicide prevention conference. ’Just as we helped foster the jet age, the space age and the Internet, I want us to break new ground in understanding the human mind.” Panetta: http://www.stripes.com/news/panetta-suicide-problem-goes-far-beyond-combat-veterans-1.181079

What I find remarkable about Panetta’s comments is his presumption that having mentioned three earlier “miracles” by the Department of Defense  (the “we” of the Defense Secretary), he is about to “break new ground” in understanding the human mind” as a fourth “miracle”.

It is no doubt a coincidence that in a series of blogs in which I try to explain the rise of Western Christianity by way of Christianity having been usurped by a Western coup d’etad, just as I am about to close the series, there appears one from the West, who will engineer an “understanding [of] the human mind.” No lesser man, than the Pope of American Defense Leon Panetta, is prepared, through profound meditation, to gain an “understanding of the human mind.”

I could not have been presented with a more perfect example of American Christian hubris. I bet no American Christian will take a note of it, because it is such a habit of this—as some say—“Christian nation” to collaborate with secular princes, oligarchs, corporate CEOs, ministers of state, state secretaries, et al.

As the article notes, the suicide rate among American military service men and woman is increasing. Altogether some 10.3 million Americans last year are said to have tried it. The authorities are baffled why such suicides should also be increasing among the military, who have never participated directly in bloody military combat.

To give the Defence Secretary a helping hand, I would, first, suggest that he check out whether the suicide rate in a modern army does not have something to do with urban naiveté propagated by doctrinaire imaging presented and made universal by corporate  advertising, and whether the virtual nature of life in a city built of concrete, glass, and plaster board when n^thed  by the sterility of barracks life is not, by itself, an intolerable form of death.

Secondly, Panetta ought to check out whether what he calls ‘suicide’ may not have something to do with self-sacrifice—as difficult as it may be for him to imagine this. What I have in mind is that ever since the repression of Eastern Christianity and petrification of self=sacrifice into sacrifice and suicide, a military ‘suicide’ is denied the right to imagine his-her death in terms of self-sacrifice. After all, how is one to justify suicide as an act of protest against the Terminator of terrorism?

Nevertheless, such a justification may be imagined. It results from having a President who can name anyone a terrorist, and all military men and women unavoidably become the executors of the Terminator’s Will.

Let me presume that the President of Latvia decides to  call me a ‘terrorist’ and the military is asked to remove my presence from Latvia. Are the military then not the executors of a President’s will, and thereby take on the role of legitimized sacrificers sent to get me?

Which makes me wonder, whether the individual or team of individuals who receive the order to execute me are not actually priests of Templo Mayor (re Pentagon-NATO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templo_Mayor , but must remain unaware of the Lacanian role http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/lacanianism  assigned them by NATO psychologists?

In other words, the current plague of suicides in the military is a radical form of unconscious or Lacanian protest by X (re: a female praying mantis, see above link, facing you wearing a mask of an Aztec priest) against a government attempting to exploit human kind?.

Are not the young men and women who take their lives while serving their country committing suicide because they are made of such a ‘human mind’ (as assigned them by Panetta) as does not know the difference between suicide and self-sacrifice? Which is why they are not really committing suicide, but self-sacrificing themselves?

Blog 17 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Following up on the real meaning of ‘Parliamentary democracy’ and ‘corporate individuals’, and taking into consideration the thousand year long evolution of this theme—through relentless attacks by parliamentarian democrats on egalitarian democrats, one cannot but conclude that the so-called modern era and its ‘developed nations’ are a consequence of the attempt to destroy the self-sacrificial meme that permits the individual to development a transindividual community.

In other words, by restraining and eliminating self-sacrifice and letting violence determine ‘progress’ much has been achieved. At the same time, the price of the achievement has been the destruction of the planet’s ecology and ‘democracy’ in an egalitarian sense.

When Basil (the Bogomil) was incinerated in the fire-pit at the Hippodrome of Constantinople…

 [As for: “Basil, since he  was their leader of the Bogomils  and showed no sign whatever of remorse [over being a Chrisiian of the East], the members of the Holy Synod, the chief monks, as well as the patriarch of that time (Nicolas) unanimously decided that he must be burn”... ],

…a corporate democracy had already claimed the day. This we know from the New Testament, which tells us that (?John) Basil was replaced by a Jesus fabricated of the compromise the princes and boyars had forced on the terrorized Christian Church of the East. The Big Compromise that seemingly healed the Great Schism went something like this:

We (Western Catholics) will let you preach your religion, if you stop backing it up with self-sacrificial acts and, indeed, cease supporting such acts other than passive acknowledgement, which some ‘unbalanced’ minds may be moved to perform in the future.

This is why today the governments of the West do not fear accusing citizens of their own countries as ‘terrorists’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism . Certainly, the Christians of the East, who dissented from the princeling-led Western Catholic Christianity would today be called ‘terrorists’, re the U.S. and NATO countries.

Such boxing-in of self-sacrifice increasingly privatized aggression, which given an unchecked reign would have led society to develop in the direction of the ancient social curse known as anarcho-capitalism or the vendetta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalist_symbolism . To prevent the development of anarcho-capitalism (a libertarian version of egalitarian democracy), the privatization of aggression and its potential to develop into violence had to be checked. This was done through the hierarchical principle using wealth and seniority as measuring devices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seniority.

However, no legal device is, in and of itself, able to prevent the development of corporations that may not ultimately threaten the law-makers. In our time, such corporations are known as “too big to fail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail ”. If and when there develops a crisis that threatens an entire society, it is the corporate interests that prevail over the public interest. At such times, the corporate interest must be faced down by an opposition willing to use self-sacrifice as the determining principle of leadership. If the government is unable for whatever reason to muster the energy to resist, the corporations may take over government itself.

As the secrecy of the Trans Pacific Partnership (for TPP see blog 16) negotiations indicates, many governments are at the stage, where corporate power and wealth is demanding them to yield their power to a corpor4ation led parliamentary democracy, the constituent elements of which are not political parties, but private moneyed interests in which private wealth is the predominant interest and determines future developments.

It ought, therefore, be of interest to us that at this time, when Eastern Christianity is practically nonexistent in the mind’s eye of the West, and Western Christianity survives by corrupt machinations of its finances, a Slovenian atheist philosopher Slavoy Zizek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek  should propound at atheist’s answer to the loss of self-sacrificial motivation in theological circles. Writes Zizek (in “The Monstrosity of Christ”) in a paraphrase of the English writer Chesterton: “…when people imagine all kinds of deeper meanings because they ‘are frightened of four words: He was made Man.’ What really frightens them is that they will lose… God as the hidden master pulling strings—instead of this, we get a God who abandons this transcendent position and throws himself into his own creation, fully engaging in it up to dying….”

Blog 14 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012



A Sideways View of A Tree in Rebirth.



To continue to follow through with the news of the day (not necessarily to the day), here is a worth while read from Stratfor:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/spain-debt-and-sovereignty?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20120612&utm_term=gweekly&utm_content=readmore&elq=ae946eda948d4861abb0d1cc3fd9d18c

The article illustrates just how vulnerable in the Big Scheme of Things is Latvia, especially when it is governed by ‘know nothings’ and ‘no brainers’. If indeed “The European Union is built around Germany”, will Bruessels be anything but a German and EU capital, and may not Koenigsberg of Old Prussia fame become necessary to defend Latvia?

The author of the article, George Friedman, of Stratfor continues: “During the U.S. Civil War, the future of the Union was challenged by the secession of the South. The decisions were made on the battlefields where men were willing to die either for the Union or to break away from it. Who will die for the European Union? And what will hold it together when its decisions are unpopular? The concept of extended integration can work, but not without the passion that moves a Greek or a German to protect his and his country's interest. Without that, the glue that holds nations together is missing in the European Union.”

Latvia’s sovereignty is, everyone knows, hawked by the Latvian boyars (known today as oligarchs) for dollars or euros. The perpetrators are they, who have compromised themselves early enough in the “Game over Latvia” to sell it, yet even more disastrously for the Latvian Commons http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Commons to gradually liquidate it.

While there are few who agree with me today, I believe that the “Latvian Commons” has much to do with the Rus of St. Vladimir. It is in Latvia’s interest to belong to a Commonwealth that insures it sovereignty.

The Latvian synonym for ‘Commons’, incidentally, is “saime”, a word at the foundation of the seat of the alleged democratic government of Latvia, re Saeima. The Latvian ‘saime’ means a bond, a group, a household, a unit that lives much as a family does, but acts as an extended economic unit within which not all members are of the same nucleus, which consists of a ‘saimnieks’ and ‘saimniece’, close symbolic kin of Adam and Eve.

What does all that have to do with St. John or plain Johns?

We need to continue with our history lesson from Wikepedia a little longer:

“Immediately after the murder of Fyodor and Ioann, early medieval Rus saw persecutions against Christians, many of whom escaped or concealed their belief.
However, Prince Vladimir mused over the incident long after, and not least for political considerations. According to the early Slavic chronicle called Tale of Bygone Years, which describes life in Kyivan Rus' up to the year 1110, he sent his envoys throughout the civilized world to judge at first hand the major religions of the time—Islam, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Byzantine Orthodoxy. They were most impressed with their visit to Constantinople, saying, "We knew not whether we were in Heaven or on Earth… We only know that God dwells there among the people, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations."

And why should Tale of Bygone Years tell that the envoys sent by Tsar Vladimir should prefer Constantinople over all others? Was it that all Constantinoplians were drunkards (in days when vodka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodka had not likely to have been invented yet)? Or was it perhaps because the people of Rus, the allaged pa-jahns or po-ivans, felt greater religious affinity with Constantinople?

Alright, what affinity?

Re: The bonds of the Eurasian ‘saime’, which have been stolen and replaced by the state-dependent Christian ‘family’.

Can you prove such a thing?

The word ‘saime’ speaks for itself. It is known that before the enthroning of St. Vladimir over Kiev, Vladimir was a payan (the correct word for pagan), yet one who was familiar with Christianity and who, yet, sacrificed human beings not only after a victorious battle, but probably also before it—to insure that his soldiers knew among themselves a blood bond great enough to bring victory.

We can assume that in the Christianity practiced among the people from whose midst St. Vladimir himself came, human self-sacrifice was not an alien thing. We know that self-sacrifice among the Christians of the West is if not quite forbidden, closely tied to the word ‘suicide’, which was universally, recognized as a disgraceful act. In fact, suicide was condemned with a fatwa or social taboo that was as strong as the one  against incest.